A view of the on/off key on the Pertec / MITS 8800b Turnkey model. The system required some minor repairs, a short was detected in the turnmon board preventing I/O from the Turnmon board. I repaired some burned out traces and set the baud rate to 9600.

View of a repaired turnkey "turnmon" board. Note S0, S1, and S2 are jumpered to produce 9600 baud. S0 required minor repair, some of the original trace metal was lost. The staining is only cosmetic. Click image for larger vie">...[ read more ]

After years sitting on top of a dryer in the laundry room, the entire motherboard became covered by lint dust. This photo shows some dust removed, revealing a pretty serviceable circuit board with little rust. Click image for larger view.

Keyboard Repair
The system boots but other than the "u" key and the "Enter" key the keyboard does not respond to keystrokes. I took apart the keyboard. The circuit board tests OK and the key">...[ read more ]

Making heads or tails of the LGP-30 SIMH simulator written for the Royal Precision Electronic Computer model LGP-30 is a worthy challenge for any early 21st Century computer user. Built by the Royal McBee Corporation and first sold in late 1956, this machine is mentioned by sources to be the first personal computer - i.e. the first electronic computer designed for one person to use / operate. The Friden Flexowriter is the I/O device. The Flexowriter is similar to the ASR 33 Teletype in that it included both a typewriter/printer and a papertape storage/reader function.
Operational">...[ read more ]

With a serial terminal attached, the Sun Ultra 1 workstation displays the point of failure upon boot. False color image taken without flash. Click image for larger view.

The keyboard lights when power is applied and it appears that the system attempts to read a CD if present in the CD ROM drive. That's kind of good news. Consistent with a bad NVRAM chip there is nothing coming through the hi-res display. I have 2 unformatted harddrives installed and a Solaris 9 CD (system came with it in the CD drive). I think the system is freezing when it gets to the point of attempting to access the CD drive, but that's just a hunch. Does not matter if there is something in the CD drive or not. The harddrives I have">...[ read more ]

This AT&T PC 7300 was donated for study. The AT&T PC 7300 UNIX Computer from 1985. Serial Number 370429020 000139

So far I have tested the power and the memory, all OK. System originally booted up, but I did not have any login info so I decided to format the drive and re-install the OS from disks. There is a minimal OS 3.5.1 loaded for the moment. Doing research to determine next best action.
Pictures">...[ read more ]

This SCSI to SD adapter serves as hard drive. A lot faster and more reliable. Click image for larger view.

Installed an SD to SCSI drive and Jon Chapman (glitchworks) installed onto that Sun OS Release 4.1.4 from the internal CD drive (I think or external drive). Either way , it works. the only issue is that from the serial c">...[ read more ]

The NeXTstation Turbo computer. The effort required to get this machine running was minimal. I was able to complete a usable network configuration within a few minutes. As with most NeXT systems it came installed with the NeXTStep version of Berkeley UNIX BSD, the grandfather of the MAC OS X. Click image for larger view.

Here is a view of the motherboard, drives, and power supply. Click image for larger view.

by billdegTotal messages in this thread: 4Updated: [ SuperPET WCS Disk Backup ] 12/21/2017 The manuals supplied by Commodore are frustratingly incomplete and require a lot of head banging and experimenting to accomplish what should be simple tasks. The top of the klugey list is printing a program listing.
Here are some useful tips and tricks including a few things that are not found in the original manuals. I still recommend that you try to find and read a copy of the SuperPET manuals (pamplets) too.
1. In order to use the SuperPET in 6809 mode, you must have the OS boot disk titled "SuperPet WCS" present in drive 1 (left drive) of an 8050 (or 8250) dual-diskette drive. Set the side dip switches to 6809 and R/W. If you do not have this disk or a 8050/8250 drive, you'll have to trouble doing much more than staring at the initial boot menu. This menu lists the programming language options (Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, etc.) BUT these components are not included in">...[ read more ]

Here is a view of the NeXT Cube from the front with the chassis, optical drive and inner drive cover removed. The backplane is visible on the bottom with the motherboard (on it's side) and power supply (not visible) plugged into it. The system's internal full-height 5 1/4" hard drive sits unsecured upon the power supply, plugged into the motherboard from the back. The hard drive is an SCSI Seagate ST41200N. Click image for larger view.

Pictured Next's Sound Box, an I/O port station. A separate box is necessary because the color workstation display does not have internal speakers like the monochrome display. The NS Color I/O cable attaches to the back of the computer on one end and on the other end the cable is s">...[ read more ]

by billdegTotal messages in this thread: 2Updated: [ Apply SMTP security to Vax 4000-200 ] 12/02/2017 A VAX with VMS 5 that uses the MULTINET TCP/IP stack is vulnerable to third-party SMTP relay hijacks by any Tom-BOT-and-Harry probing around for a port 25 SMTP server. Case in point, my MicroVAX 3100 exposed to the outside Internet would clog up with queued relay messages in a matter of hours putting me at risk of being flagged by my ISP (Comcast). As a result I could not keep the machine online for an extended period. I decided to see if I could solve the problem at the VMS or MULTINET stack level. Yes it would be easier to simply install a modern router or firewall solution but what fun would that be?
Here is an example message from the queue:
$ show queue /full
10 SMTP-RETURN SYSTEM 19 Holding until 2-DEC-2017 12:49
Submitted 2-DEC-2017 12:18 /FORM=DEFAULT
/PARAM=("yahoo.com.hk; Error sending MAIL command to yahoo.com.">...[ read more ]